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Comment by gingerlime | Hacker News Reader

I honestly love Linode and am sure they'll come out better as a result of this. But our customers aren't as understanding. Currently we're playing a bit of cat and mouse and with each data centre going down - we're switching our recovery process into gear and restoring to a different VPS (outside Linode). We have linodes on pretty much all locations, but if this continues at this rate, we simply won't have any linodes left there.

It would be very hard to justify going back to Linode afterwards, even with the best intentions to do so. "... So you seriously want us to go back to this hosting provider that caused us all this mess over Christmas / New Year's??"

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That's exactly what the reaction the attackers want.

However, what are the alternatives? Linode have been dead stable for me the past many years, and delivers what they promise in a transparent way. No overselling of servers. No sudden extra bills.

Linode will come out stronger after this, so it won't be able to happen on this scale again.

The big question is: Who, with a lot of money, would want to hurt Linode's business in this way? This isn't just a "script kiddie" having fun. It's a very well planned and powerful attack requiring buying large botnet capacity for an extensive amount of time.

Genuine question: What does anyone have to gain from Linode's misfortune? What sort of group would do this?

A competitor seems like a pretty obvious answer.

But the vps market is fairly crowded, I can't imagine what attacking a single competitor would actually accomplish.

> A competitor seems like a pretty obvious answer.

I don't know... unless Linode has a large presense in a country where this level of play is expected. I have hard time imagining a large US cloud / hosting company comparible in size or customer base with Linode trying it. There is too high a risk, someone will talkt and reveal it.

Why would a competitor hate Atlanta in particular? Must be going after something hosted there.

I have been surprised that this sort of approach has not been more common than it has been. It really is a credit to us as a community that this very low hanging fruit has not been exploited more often.

You're crediting the tech community for not exploiting their abilities?

BF Skinner, famous behavioral psychologist, wrote about this in "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" -- that much of positive emotions coming from choosing to do the morally "righteous" action exist because of the capacity for evil.

>You're crediting the tech community for not exploiting their abilities?

Yes I am :)

It would be easy to engage in morally bad behaviour, yet for the most part we don’t. This is a very good.

Maybe the some state actor / mafia drug lord... didn't like one of the customers and put enough effort to shut down the whole service.

Github was attacked by China before I believe for hosting some firewall by-passing software.

Maybe a competitor, but who would bother to go that low? I can't imagine any of the popular ones trying it -- too much risk it will be exposed.

It could be a competitor of someone who is using linode for their hosting. Rather than attacking a single server which would be easier to track down, it's probably easier to attack the whole network.

May not be the case here, but Bitcoin ransoms are become more common.

Usually these are extortion schemes. Pay x bitcoins to this address or else.

> This isn't just a "script kiddie" having fun. It's a very well planned and powerful attack requiring buying large botnet capacity for an extensive amount of time.

These days such things aren't that hard to come by. See the recent Lizard Squad attacks for example.

I don't know about dead stable. Fremont?

I agree, but I am unsure of the come back stronger sentiment. This looks to be a serious attack driven by a knowledgeably adversary. I really feel for linode at this point.

> Who, with a lot of money, would want to hurt Linode's business in this way? This isn't just a "script kiddie" having fun. It's a very well planned and powerful attack requiring buying large botnet capacity for an extensive amount of time.

Serious question: how much is "a lot of money' in this case? How much does an attack like this cost?

Unfortunately linode hasn't specified enough to give specifics about that.

From what they have said however, it seems to me like this is generally a very "smart" attack.

Unfortunately, a smart attack can be done much more cheaply in terms of botnet capacity than a dumb volumetric attack (this still combines a volumetric attack, but, in targeted ways).

I have delt with these kinds of attacks (defending them) and they are, unfortunately, much too cheap to pull off. Botnet capacity is dirt cheap, if you're willing to spend the time to find/compromise your own botnet hosts, its effectively free.

I'm definitely curious to find out, but feels more like gossip to be honest...

Given the length of time since the first attacks started and the downtime of the most recent attack, the big questions I have are:

1. What are they doing right now?

2. What mistakes were made / Why didn't they realise the risk beforehand? / (how) could this have been avoided?

3. What can they do in future to prevent this?

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